The Poor Get Prison: The
Alarming Spread of the Criminalization of
Poverty
This report provides a new understanding of
the growing ways in which those in poverty
are disproportionately targeted,
marginalized, and prosecuted.
By Karen Dolan
March 27, 2015 "ICH"
- Poor people, especially people of color,
face a far greater risk of being fined,
arrested, and even incarcerated for minor
offenses than other Americans. A broken
taillight, an unpaid parking ticket, a minor
drug offense, sitting on a sidewalk, or
sleeping in a park can all result in jail
time. In this report, we seek to understand
the multi-faceted, growing phenomenon of the
“criminalization of poverty.”
In many ways, this phenomenon
is not new: The introduction of public
assistance programs gave rise to prejudices
against beneficiaries and to systemic
efforts to obstruct access to the
assistance.
This form of criminalizing
poverty — racial profiling or the targeting
of poor black and Latina single mothers
trying to access public assistance — is a
relatively familiar reality. Less well-known
known are the new and growing trends which
increase this criminalization of being poor
that affect or will affect hundreds of
millions of Americans. These troubling
trends are eliminating their chances to get
out of poverty and access resources that
make a safe and decent life possible.
In this report we will
summarize these realities, filling out the
true breadth and depth of this national
crisis. The key elements we examine are:
- the targeting of poor
people with fines and fees for
misdemeanors, and the resurgence of
debtors’ prisons – the imprisonment of
people unable to pay debts resulting
from the increase in fines and fees;
- mass incarceration of
poor ethnic minorities for non-violent
offenses, and the barriers to employment
and re-entry into society once they have
served their sentences;
- excessive punishment
of poor children that creates a
“school-to-prison pipeline”;
- increase in arrests
of homeless people and people feeding
the homeless, and criminalizing
life-sustaining activities such as
sleeping in public when no shelter is
available; and
- confiscating what
little resources and property poor
people might have through “civil asset
forfeiture.”
Read the full report
[PDF].
Karen Dolan is a Fellow
at the Institute for Policy Studies and
directs the Criminalization of Poverty
Project. Karen also assists the Economic
Hardship Reporting Project.
